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                                                            mind

                                                             ful of

                                                            the setti

                                                           ing he co

                                                                    unted off

                                                          the seconds

                                                         in his head a

                                                        s the solitary

                                                        bee struggles

                                                       to fly inside t

                                                       he walls of a

                                                       n empty hou

                                                        se, her siste

                                                        rs dead bel

                                                        ow her; no

                                                        wind, no r

                                                        ain; we st

                                                             ayed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 framing, an act of enclosing, of closing off yourself from your environment and all the unintended sounds—car stereos, solitary bird in the tree, the male mouse alone in his cell who detects the trace of a female, pattering rain, neighbors upstairs spilling rice across the floors and slipping constantly, the drone of sister bees in the walls of your room lost for weeks, months, and each afternoon you wake to find a new bee on your windowsill, all wings still, and all the days unfold like this until you are not at the window, but the dead bees continue to come still, coming to a moment of our attention—framing, to get lost between the walls and open the mind to music; one must remove oneself or framing will remove you; you could not remove the bee that kept reappearing, (the sisters were unending); you could not remove the drone the hum inside your mind; you removed your mind—open the mind: all sounds are music; I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I

am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening to a needle drop, I am listening

to— I am dropping all the need         les I keep on dropping the needles I have always dropped the needles the needles are stacked in my pa            lm in the palm of my hand of my mind my hands enclose the environment \of the needles, what can             you hear in the amplified cactus of this palm of mine? pay attention: each time the thrums of a d               ishwasher are different; let me not be the only listener wis hing that the music could go on a littl                   e longer, unintended sounds and all, let me not be the only, let me not be let me not—

this stupid                  amplified cactus begging for some new approach to framin g, to listening to unintended unattend               ed I will attend to you listening in a moment of attention to life my mind is open to the

fact—let        me beg, let me blur these boundaries between life and sou ndlessness, I will do all the exercises,

I              will listen to all that drops—please be not art but life, be life, please be—here, a simple explanation             for resistance: our human ears have vulnerability to unfamiliar sounds; when you hear these sounds and fee   l trapped, you must remove yourself from what surrounds yo u: these sounds, these sounds we have vulnerability to unfamiliar—remove yourself from frames remove the frame, remove the do not panic, do not panic is the simplest explanation the simplest resistance to music; do not simply resist, resist; we who are free to move around who are free, we fill in what bewilders us to fill what

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BUZKASHI

with debt to Mark Levine

 

A brother fastens his helmet. His son does the same.

He who has fifty horses backs no one

but a son, a warlord says from his warm compound

where the warlord is running for vice president.

Time is incestuous this way.

1979: the Soviets shot each hoof, every head. Death

saw no danger in being nude. Then the Taliban:

they allowed the game, but rode the mares in summer

until they rode no more. She who is not consoled

lasts longer than the fever of a horse

whose teeth flare out in prayer, Khyber blade

in the crosshatch hands of her rider, hands from a life

of whipping. Whose blood is on the ground is she

whose god is a wrestler who trains

beneath the rising moon whose rider scythes the harvest.

A horse can nudge a man with her chest,

come down without bending her knees. She knows what he wants

she knows what he wants her to do.

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AS FOR THE CORPSES, NO DOOR

 

Pale girl, fat carcass; boy uncut, unhooved.

The combination of girl and boy

in flowering desert. Girl and boy in flood,

brackish water. For the sake of children. Her brain

like cauliflower, cheesecake in dark rooms;

girl and boy: conscience between two mothers.

The upper half of body, the lower depth of honey,

rough beast, dark brass—burnt tokens from home,

remnants, chrysanthemums in a gale. Their olio of limbs.

Here then, new habitat: his forehead

in early sunlight where cold scarlet

and opaline mind, her cilia her sinew, mole underfoot.

Here then, her false-thorned earrings and sycamore skins,

wind white with petals wild from a week alone.

Alone, undone—like a father and a feather whose forecast:

breath, oil, fossil. Pharmakon: a cure as well as a poison.

In open grave, her hands deep in the pockets of.

The voice of a crane.

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-from Root Fractures

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A poet and multimedia artist, Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of (2018) which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Root Fractures (2024). Her video work has been exhibited at the Miller Institute ICA and selected for the Silver Falls Film Festival. Nguyen is a Kundiman fellow and member of the Vietnamese artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and winner of the 92Y “Discovery” Poetry Contest and 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she currently teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.